NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE

Native American literature begins with the oral
traditions in the hundreds of Indigenous cultures
of North America and finds its fullness in
all aspects of written literature as well. Until
the last several decades, however, Native American
literature has primarily been studied for
its ethnographic interest. A fruitful intellectual
discussion of the place of Native American literature
within global literary study–a discussion
that includes Native American intellectuals,
artists, and writers themselves–only
began during the activist period of the 1960s
and 1970s.

The written Native American literary tradition
commenced as early as the eighteenth
century, when a Mohegan Methodist missionary,
Samson Occum, published his Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian in 1772. William Apess (Pequot), also a
Christian minister, wrote an autobiography
that protested non-Indians' treatment of Indians,
and he also collected the autobiographies
of other Christian Indians in Experiences of Five Christian Indians of the Pequot Tribe
(1833). Other Native Americans published historical
and cultural accounts of their peoples
during the nineteenth century: David Cusick
(Tuscarora); George Copway, Peter Jones, and
William Whipple Warren (Ojibwa); Peter
Dooyentate Clarke (Wyandot); Chief Elias
Johnson (Tuscarora); and Chief Andrew J.
Blackbird (Ottawa). These valuable writings
represent a range of genres and reflect cultural
issues of the times in which they were written.

Plains Indian oral literature includes literary
expressions from cultures as different as Blackfeet
(northwestern Montana) are from Kiowa
(Southern Plains). By far, autobiographies
comprise the bulk of written literary materials.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, academics–mostly anthropologists
and historians–took up the idea that Native
testimony or life stories needed to be preserved.
Many believed that Native Americans
were disappearing and with them their languages
and histories; great efforts needed to be
made to preserve cultural histories and literatures
in writing. While many Native Americans
wrote their own autobiographies during
this period, many more had their life stories
recorded as "as-told-to" autobiographies by
anthropologists, ethnographers, and "Indian
buffs." Plains Indian life stories, particularly
those of warriors and chiefs, were so plentiful
that they became a genre unto themselves.

Black Elk Speaks (Lakota) is probably the
most famous as-told-to narrative, a text "told
through" John G. Neihardt. Because the poet
Neihardt was most interested in obtaining
Black Elk's story for his poetic work on the
American West, he omitted aspects of Black
Elk's life that did not fit his own poetic purposes.
In his study of Black Elk Speaks, entitled
The Sixth Grandfather, Raymond DeMallie
presents the transcripts of the initial interviews
with Black Elk, enabling us to study the life of
Black Elk and the textual creation of that
famous work. Other well-known as-told-to
Plains autobiographies include Pretty Shield: Medicine Woman of the Crows and Plenty-Coups: Chief of the Crows (both as told to Frank
B. Linderman in 1932 and 1930, respectively)
and Cheyenne Memories (by John Stands in
Timber and Margot Liberty, 1967). Most notable
among the self-generated autobiographies
of the early twentieth century are Charles Eastman's
(Dakota) Indian Boyhood (1902) and
From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916) and
Gertrude Bonnin's (Lakota) American Indian Stories (1921), a mixture of short fiction, autobiography,
and nonfiction. Contemporary
Lakota as-told-to autobiographies continue,
for example, Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions
(1972) and Lakota Woman (1990), both written
with Richard Erdoes.

European literary genres such as poetry and
fiction, for the most part, began being employed
by Native American people in the nineteenth
century. John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee) wrote
the first Native American novel in English, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (1854).
The most famous Plains Indian writer is N.
Scott Momaday (Kiowa), whose first novel,
House Made of Dawn (1968), won the Pulitzer
Prize for literature in 1969. The Way to Rainy Mountain, the autobiography he published a
year later, traces his journey from the mountains
of Montana to Rainy Mountain in Oklahoma,
the path Kiowa people followed as their
culture was transformed through acquisition of
the Tai-Me, the Sun Dance medicine bundle.
Momaday's influence since the 1960s cannot be
underestimated; through his writing, he created
a new voice and a new place for Native American
writers in the American imagination.

The era of awakening, dubbed the Native
American Renaissance by literary critic Kenneth
Lincoln, witnessed the production of many new
Indian texts after Momaday's influential novel
and autobiographical memoir, including works
by Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna), Simon Ortiz
(Acoma Pueblo), and Ray Young Bear
(Mesquaki) as well as poetry by Roberta Hill
(Oneida), Duane Niatum (Klallam), Joy Harjo
(Creek), and Wendy Rose (Hopi-Miwok), and
others. James Welch, a Plains writer of Blackfeet
and Gros Ventre heritage, has been and
remains prominent among Native American
writers, with five novels, one book of poetry,
and a nonfictional book on the Indian point of
view of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

The substantial amount of writing by Native
Americans now enables the identification
of clusters of work based on genre, tribal affiliation,
geography, theme, style, gender, and
sexual preference. The blossoming of nonfictional
essay writing and literary criticism by
Natives themselves bodes well for the future
study of Native American literature. Most notable
among contemporary essayists is Elizabeth
Cook-Lynn (Crow-Creek-Dakota); her
collection Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner
(1996) hits at crucial contemporary Native
American struggles, challenges, and grievances
in tough-minded and bold terms. Although
primarily a poet and fiction writer,
Cook-Lynn presents "a tribal voice" (the subtitle
of the text) that cannot be ignored. Most
importantly, Native American literature owes
its existence to continuing and vibrant oral
traditions.